Joining the Qubes Team as Community Manager

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve joined the Qubes team in a part-time
role as Community Manager. I consider it an honor to have the
opportunity to work with such a talented team of individuals and to serve
such a dynamic community. As the Community Manager, I’ll primarily be
responsible for things like handling user feedback, organizing bug
reports, tracking community-developed features, and facilitating community
contributions to the codebase. (As with any small project, however, we all
wear many hats, so if there’s ever anything Qubes-related I can help you
with, please let me know.)

I’ve been active in the Qubes community for several years now under the
pseudonym “Axon,” primarily writing documentation and helping to maintain
the Qubes website in my spare time as a volunteer (which I plan to continue
doing alongside my new role). In joining the Qubes team more
officially, however, I’ve decided to retire my pseudonym and to begin
using my real identity. I consider myself fortunate to be in a position
to make this choice. For me, the decision to use a pseudonym was based
primarily on considerations of personal privacy. For many other people
around the world, however, pseudonymous and anonymous communication is a
matter of life and death. This is one reason that I believe Qubes OS
– and especially its partnership with Whonix – is so important:
it allows for the secure compartmentalization of these various contextual
identities (along with all the other areas of one’s digital life) in ways
which would not otherwise be possible. More importantly, however, it
freely puts this control in the hands of individual users.

Admittedly, it currently takes a certain kind of user – one who is
sufficiently self-motivated and willing to learn – to make full use of
Qubes OS. This is something we’re continually working on. By working to
make Qubes accessible to a wider user base, we aim to make strong
endpoint security available to everyone, regardless of their level of
technical expertise. As computers continue to become increasingly
integrated with our lives (and our bodies), the importance of secure
computing increases proportionately for all of us.

Identity Verification

If you’d like to verify my identity, I’d be happy to help. There are
three PGP keys you may wish to authenticate:

Then, you can verify that this post itself has been signed by all three
keys. There are several ways to do this. Since this post is a clearsigned
message block, the most obvious way is simply to copy it directly from
your browser. Start by telling GPG that you’d like to verify something:

$ gpg --verify

Next, copy the signed message block from this page to your clipboard.
(Extraneous text is fine, so you can simply press ctrl + A to select
all the text on this page, followed by ctrl + C.) Then, simply paste
it into your terminal emulator and press ctrl + D. GPG will proceed
to verify the signatures.

Alternatively, you may prefer a clearsigned, plain text version
of this post. (Perhaps your browser has rendered the text differently,
invalidating the signature, or you simply don’t want to bother with all
that copying and pasting.) After downloading and reviewing the file,
you can verify it like so:

With any luck, you’re now convinced that all three keys belong to the same
person and that this person is the author of the words you’re reading.
For other objects signed by these keys, feel free to check out my signed
commits to the Qubes website and documentation
repos, my signed emails to the mailing lists, and the proofs available
from my Keybase profile.

Finally, please note that since I’m no longer using the “Axon” pseudonym,
I’ll begin using my primary key (0xBC211FCEE9C54C53) instead of the
Axon key (0xA4ECAE9C8E97231E) for everything except Qubes documentation
signing. I intend to allow the latter’s active subkeys to expire without
renewal on 2016-10-03.